'One must find the strength to resist': Primo Levi's warning to history
Philip Roth once called Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man and The Truce – usually published as one volume – “one of the century’s truly necessary books”. If you’ve read Levi, the only quibble you could make with Roth is that he’s too restrictive in only referring to the 20th century. It’s impossible to imagine a time when the two won’t be essential, both because of what they describe and the clarity and moral force of Levi’s writing. Reading him is not a passive process. It isn’t just that he makes us see and understand the terrible crimes that he himself saw in Monowitz-Buna. It’s that in doing so, he also makes us witnesses, passing us knowledge that gives us a moral and practical responsibility. We too must remember. We too must tell others.
I write this article now in the hope that I can encourage more people to read Levi and understand his importance. If you’re hesitating now – and if I can possibly induce you – go read this book.
If I can’t persuade you, let me turn to Roth again, who described Levi’s achievement thus:
With the moral stamina and intellectual poise of a 20th-century Titan, this slightly built, dutiful, unassuming chemist set out systematically to remember the German hell on earth, steadfastly to think it through, and then to render it comprehensible in lucid, unpretentious prose. He was profoundly in touch with the minutest workings of the most endearing human events and the most contemptible.
The testimonies that commenters have shared in this month’s reading group have also been moving and impressive. BengalEuropean, for instance, recalled reading Levi’s 1982 novel If Not Now, When?: “I read it at one of those turning or decision points in life, and it helped me to find the courage to decide to do something that dramatically changed my future. Apart from his Holocaust memoir – which is every bit as profound and important as posters here are saying – he’ll always occupy a special place in my mind as a writer able to frame the right questions and to suggest ways to think and behave as a human.”
HellzaPopp1n wrote: “This book had a great impact on me. One aspect in particular that has stuck with me is how he vividly describes true, raw, all-consuming physical hunger and what one might be prepared to do to get the tiniest scraps of food. I shall never say ‘I’m hungry’ again.”
“I still think of many of the things Primo Levi describes, such as how it was better to be on the top bunk, how he still had that habit, years later, of constantly looking at the ground,” wrote babystrange. “I went to the Auschwitz museum and, as horrific as that is, I still found nothing evokes the horror of the Holocaust like this book.”
And deadgod eloquently summed up the urgency of reading Primo Levi: “The point of Levi’s being on a ‘life syllabus’ isn’t just … responsibility to Levi himself (though there is that); one probably doesn’t have time and might not have the strength to read every gutting Shoah book. The responsibility is also to those who didn’t survive the Khmer Rouge, or Srebrenica or Rwanda. The responsibility is to the indigenous peoples of the western hemisphere and Australia and the Pacific islands. And so on.”
I’m optimistic that the world can be less bad, and I’m convinced that writing like Levi’s contributes to this possibility. Levi looked to the future himself, while travelling through Vienna in The Truce; the Nazis seem to have been vanquished, but he warns us that he still sees “an irreparable and definitive evil which was present everywhere, nestling like a gangrene in Europe and the world, the seed of future harm.” In a later afterword, he tell us to always be “suspicious of those who seek to convince us with means other than reason, and of charismatic leaders: we must be cautious about delegating to others our judgment and our will.”
His warning to history continues:
In every part of the world, wherever you begin by denying the fundamental liberties of mankind, and equality among people, you move toward the concentration camp system, and it is a road on which it is difficult to halt … A new fascism, with its trail of intolerance, of abuse, and of servitude, can be born outside our country, and be imported into it, walking on tiptoe and calling itself by other names, or it can loose itself from within with such violence that it routs all defences. At that point, wise counsel no longer serves and one must find the strength to resist.
